More news from NetBSD land: inside and outside the kernel
My inbox is still overflowing with NetBSD related news,
so here is the next chunk for you:

People owning a Marvell PCMCIA WiFi card can how have
a look at
the malo(4) driver.
If you use this on a gumstix ARM board, have a look
as some fiddling with drvctl(8) is needed to get the
card recognized properly.

Speaking about
Gumstix,
KIYOHARA Takashi has declared the
porting effort as finished.
Support for the baex, connex, verdex and verdex-pro
modules is available, as is support for the support modules.

Staying in the "embedded" corner, KIYOHARA Takashi has
announced
that Plathome's OpenBlockS600 (AMCC 405EX) can now
boot NetBSD via NFS. See the posting for dmesg output.
The
OpenBlockS600
comes with a AMCC 405EX PowerPC CPU,
two GigE ethernet ports and a bunch of other
goodies for a price of about $600US.

Getting back to the NetBSD code, a number of interesting changes
were made in the previous weeks. The first to mention is that
David Young has continued is work on
the new shutdown order
for device drivers:
``cgd, dk, dm, md, raid, and vnd gracefully detach from the device
tree during shutdown. I believe that ccd is the only virtual disk that
does not detach.''
This allows having arbitrary stack of file systems, and still
have them unconfigured properly in the right order on system
shutdown.

Moving from userland inside the kernel, David Holland has
proceeded with work to
unhook LFS from UFS.
Historically, the Log structured File System was written after
the Berkeley Fast File System. With the idea of sharing
the core "Unix File System" code for both file systems,
this resulted in a strong relationship between LFS and FFS,
which was/is not always the best for the advantage and
stability of either one:
``sharing ufs between both ffs and lfs has
made all three entities (but particularly lfs) gross. ffs and lfs are
not similar enough structurally for this sharing to really be a good
design.''

Another major addition to the NetBSD kernel was made recently
by Darren Hunt:
``Courtesy of CoyotePoint Systems, I've been working on a port of
DTrace [...] to NetBSD for i386.''
Citing Wikipedia,
``DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.

DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes. It can also provide much more fine-grained information, such as a log of the arguments with which a specific function is being called, or a list of the processes accessing a specific file. ''

So much about about the NetBSD code for now. Of course having
all those fine features added screams for an immediate (*cough*)
release, which brings me to the fact that
NetBSD 5.0.2 has been released:
`` NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons.

Please note that all fixes in critical/security updates (i.e., NetBSD 5.0.1, 5.0.2, etc.) are cumulative, so the latest update contains all such fixes since the corresponding minor release. These fixes will also appear in future minor releases (i.e., NetBSD 5.1, 5.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. ''